Trajectories of ecology past and future

Ecosystems have many different processes going on. Researchers need to select and simplify, and so development of ecology as a discipline has involved finding different possible ways to select and simplify. The history is summarised via six strands: zonation of vegetation physiognomy, single-species population dynamics, population interactions, ecosystems as machines through which energy cascades and nutrients cycle, episodic events and landscape mosaics, and generalisation across species. Australia has been influential in several of these strands. So then, where might ecology head in future? Future ecosystems are likely to be different from the past, partly owing to climate change, but also because of technologies such as cell culture milk and meat, new synbio organisms, and agricultural and land-management robotics. The most important framing for the future will be first-principle rules for how ecosystems are constructed. First-principle questions include the following: (1) what are the resources; where do energy and mineral nutrients come from; and linked to that (2) what is the disturbance regime and how does succession between disturbances work; (3) how does competition for resources get worked out; (4) what physical structure is contributed by habitat-forming species; and how is this influenced by competition, disturbance regime and predation on habitat-forming species? The six historical strands discussed continue to be important for addressing these questions. Ecology is seen by many students and citizens as aligned with conservation, as a Cassandra-science mainly concerned with what might go wrong in ecosystems. By framing ecology curriculum as a science of ecosystem construction, we can look more to the future and to new possibilities.